Supping With The Devil

When are our political figures going to learn the stupidity of supplying too much personal information? We now know that Nick Clegg (apparently) has had plenty of sex and that David Cameron is a red-blooded male ‘cos he had a a pin-up of a bikini-clad model on his bedroom wall. Has either of those pieces of information added to our confidence in them to lead the country? How long will it be before we learn how many women (or how few) Cameron bedded when he was single?

Politicians should appreciate that giving out personal details to hacks in order to enhance one’s image with sections of the community, is like supping with the Devil. I know of what I speak. When I was spinning my clients, senior businessmen and women, were often asked deeply intrusive questions about their private lives and it was my job to divert the hacks back to business questions. Once, a tabloid paper decided it wanted to run a deeply personal profile about a woman client. She refused the interview on the basis that her private business was exactly that and she really didn’t want to raise her personal profile. The tabloid responded by attempting to delve into her past by offering cash inducements to tell-all to people who knew her at college 20 years before. To get them off her back she agreed she would do an interview, but would only discuss business matters. They said OK and I sat in and controlled the meeting. Their questions asked with deliberately innocent sweetness, ranged from personal questions about her parents, brothers, partner , underwear and sex life. We stonewalled every single one of these and eventually they had to go back to business matters. It was a gruelling hour or so but in the event they never ran the profile which we deemed a major success.

Politicians do not have to expose their private lives to public scrutiny any more than business people do. The trouble is they have been sucked in to the celebrity culture that pervades everything these days. Stonewalling personal questions won’t stop the rumour mill but equally it won’t feed it. Every piece of personal trivia that our leaders let out about themselves diminishes their image as serious operators, but they all want to pretend that they can appeal to every single section of society, even those who don’t care who runs the country as long they have big breasts or a rampant libido.

All in all, I have become convinced that the average intelligence and awareness of our leading business people is far higher than that of our politicians.